VL-IV (14): Mass Migration of Freaks, pages 305, 314/315

[Robin Landseadel]

	Back in nineteen-sixty-three,
	We walked a fine line.
	We were takin' to the streets,
	Skatin' on a thin dime.
	We were searchin' after truth and beauty,
	Now they turn it into late-night movies.
	How can I explain,
	That it's not the same?
	Janis Ian: Guess You Had to be There

http://www.mp3lyrics.org/j/janis-ian/guess-you-had-to/

			. . . . Somewhere I had come up with the notion
	that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the
	truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite.
	Slow Learner, page 21

As far as I can tell, the Hippie diaspora has been going on as long as  
hippies. While it's true that an eleven-year can only pay so much  
attention— being easily distracted by highly sugared, brightly colored  
breakfast cereals so in vogue in 1966— I was paying attention to what  
was going on. Metallic Orange was big that year, as I recall. It  
seemed like brand new dyes were sprouting up everywhere, almost all  
proving to be quite easily faded by too much light. I spent my summer  
in Watts, the same Watts reported on by Pynchon 43 years ago:

	Restructuring of the riot goes on in other ways. All Easter week
	this year, in the spirit of the season, there was a "Renaissance
	of the Arts," a kind of festival in memory of Simon Rodia, held at
	Markham Junior High, in the heart of Watts.
	Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also
	featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely from found
	objects--found, symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia
	tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had left. Exploiting
	textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of
	the works were fine, honest rebirths.

	In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-
	ears antenna on top. Inside, where its picture tube should have
	been, gaping out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic
  	ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The 	
	name of the piece was "The Late, Late, Late Show."

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/watts.html

Part of what Pynchon saw, at this particular and elusive moment of  
time, was white flight from urban centers, the hippie diaspora  
emerging just as the hippie movement was  being born. Then again, "On  
The Road" was Old Testament to the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"'s New  
Testament.

Perhaps someone else can iron out the timeline finer, but the scene  
appears to be set in 1969 or so in this passage:

	 . . .You know, there'd be worse places for you and the ol' 	
	bundle to live, have a Home, beautiful country, only a short spin
	up or down 101 from everything, from the Two Street honky-
	tonks to the eateries of Arcata to the surfing at Shelter Cove,
	and you'd have a social life, 'cause lately this mass migration of
	freaks you spoke of, nothing personal, from L.A. north is spilling
	over into Vineland, so you'd have free baby-sitting too, dope
	connections, an inexhaustible guitar-player pool?"
	Vineland, page 305

And everything in that passage is still pretty much true, that pretty  
much defines the epicenter—the Capitol—of Freaksville [  f# minor  
organ stab ! ! ! ], the Green Triangle, that place that hippies go to  
when they "get away from the city." Vineland is yet another one of  
them Tristero-like collectives that fungly spawn and spoor and  
reproduce all through Pynchonland [a high-tech playground akin to  
Disneyland with way more Nazi junk than you really want to look at].  
[Whatever you do, don't take the I.G. Farben ride.]

When Sasha speaks of the hippie diaspora all her information is on the  
up and up, just like Jesse's seminal paper on American Patriotism and  
the ownership society, "do what they tell you" and so on:

	"Half the interior hasn't even been surveyed — plenty of
	redwoods left to get lost in, ghost towns old and new blocked up
	behind slides that are generations old and no Corps of
	Engineers'll ever clear, a whole web of logging roads, fire
	roads, Indian trails for you to learn. You can hide, all right.
	Vineland, page 305

Sounds like something out of "High Sierra."

I know we haven't spent time on this, but the Traverse saga is about  
the left's fascination with fascist tools. Think of Kit's raptor-like  
rush as he divebombs Torino.

	Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose
	to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and
	unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was
	precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably
	authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost,
	from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.
	Slow Learner, page 21

Speaking of luminous & authentic:

	Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the
	metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers
	unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first
	caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the
	towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly
	billows, you heard a lot of "Wow," and "Beautiful," though Zoyd
	only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad
	dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of
	height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea.
	They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to
	half a car length, Prairie standing up on the seat gazing out the
	window. "Headin' for nothin' but trees, fish, and fog, Slick, from
	here on in," sniffling, till your mama comes Home, he wanted to
	say, but didn't. She looked around at him with a wide smile.

	"Fiss!"

	"Yeah — fog!"

	Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down
	in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the
	open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red
	trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side.
	Prairie had been watching them all the time and in a very quiet
	voice talking to them as they passed one by one. It seemed now
	and then as if she were responding to something she was
	hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact tone of voice for a baby,
	too, as if this were a return for her to a world behind the world
	she had known all along. The storm lashed the night, dead
	trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy
	and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks
	and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around
	inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up
	conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down
	from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and
	soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective
	of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation,
	the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at
	last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one
	guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.
	Vineland, pages 314/315

Anyone who has ever taken that transitional ride from the big city [or  
valley] to "Vineland" feels the shift from a land ruled by machine,  
the frenzy of the insect mind overlord,  to the country's last  
vestiges of wildness. You feel the scents generated by the trees seep  
into your skin. For the first time in ages, you actively want to gulp  
in air.  You can still breath in wildness.